Agile Central Europe 2011 Impressions

Last week I had a pleasure of attending the Agile Central Europe 2011 conference and presenting my talk about working remotely there.

I felt that this conference would be special from the moment I received an invitation to join the open discussion on the way the event should be organized. What a fantastic idea!

The speakers, presentations and the way that the whole ACE! 2011 was organized were more than awesome. Here are the talks I liked most.

Paweł Brodziński – “Kanban: Improvements when you don’t look for them”

The presentation agenda displayed on a Kanban board served as a sort of an introduction (happening in the background) for those not familiar with the Kanban approach (including me). This way Paweł allowed himself more time to go beyond just the basics.

I especially liked the way Kanban shortens the feature lifecycle. Working in 2-week Scrum iterations I sometimes feel that there are too many various features being developed at the same time. Kanban helps to tackle this problem with it’s “Limit Work In Progress” approach.

Andrea Provaglio – Overcoming Self-organization Blocks

Probably the most psychological presentation at ACE! I really enjoyed the demonstration of rowing against the tide as well as the exercises led by Andrea during the Open Space.

By the way Andrea’s Open Space session showed one of the Open Space Principles in action. The session was so popular that the whole group decided to move to another room in order to have more space. “Whatever happens is the only thing that could have.”

Marc Löffler – Kaboom – Blow up your watermelon

Marc‘s presentation was both entertaining and enlightening. The watermelon is indeed a perfect metaphor of what  happens pretty often in our industry when it comes to reporting to the management. What is red inside looks more like green when it reaches the top executives.

Closing Keynote – Jurgen Appelo

Both the insight and the way Jurgen presented the content were awesome. He definitely set a new standard for closing keynotes by quoting every single conference speaker in his talk.

I must admit I was impressed with how great this event was. Congratulations to Paul Klipp and all people involved in organizing the ACE! 2011 conference.

-Paweł

PS I am still thinking about the name for the software development method described by Maria Diaconu and Alexandru Bolboacă in their talk “Yes, You Can Deploy Every Two Days!”.